[ENGL 553] Forms and Themes in Poetry

Course Title: Forms and Themes in Poetry

Course Description

This course acquaints students with forms and substances of poetry in socio-cultural contexts. It intends to engage students in a close reading and mapping of poems in diverse cultural settings and historical contexts.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Enhance knowledge of poetry with the grasp of basic forms and contents.
• Enrich skills to explicate, interpret, and examine poetry.
• Analyze language of poetry, including sounds and figures of speech.
• Examine poems in their historical and cultural contexts.
• Appreciate aesthetic dimensions of poetry.

Course Contents

Unit I: Fundamentals of Prosody (6 Hours)

1. Syllables and Syllabification: Stressed and Unstressed Syllables, Poetic Feet
2. Basic Meters: Iambus, Trochee, Anapest, Dactylic, Pyrrhic, Spondee
3. Figures of Speech: Simile, Metaphor, Metonymy, Symbols, Images, Irony, Paradox, Personification, Climax, Anti-climax, Hyperbole, Understatement, Allusion, Alliteration, Allegory, Anaphora, Apostrophe, Assonance, Onomatopoeia, Oxymoron, Pun, Synecdoche
4. Poetic Forms: Stanzas, Sonnet, Ode, Ballad, Limerick, Lyric, Villanelle, Elegy, Epic, Blank/Free Verse
5. Scansion

Unit II: Aesthetics of Anguish, Beauty, and Grief (9 Hours)

1. William Shakespeare: "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" and "Let Me not to the Marriage of True Minds"
2. Christopher Marlowe: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
3. John Donne: "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" and "The Good Morrow"
4. John Milton: "Lycidas"
5. Alexander Pope: "Rape of the Lock"
6. William Blake: "To the Evening Star" and "The Lamb"
7. William Wordsworth: "Tintern Abbey" and "The World Is Too Much With Us"
8. ST Coleridge: "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
9. Lord Byron: "She Walks in Beauty"
10. PB Shelly: "Mont Blanc"
11. John Keats: "Ode to the Grecian Urn"
12. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "Snow Flakes"
13. Walt Whitman: "A Noiseless Patient Spider"

Unit III: Shadow Lines of Uncertainty (12 Hours)

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson: "The Snow-Storm"
2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "A Musical Instrument"
3. Edgar Allan Poe: "The City in the Sea"
4. Alfred Lord Tennyson: "The Charge of the Light Brigade"
5. Robert Browning: "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad"
6. Matthew Arnold: "The Dover Beach"
7. Dante Gabriel Rossetti: "Silent Noon"
8. Emily Dickinson: "Because I could not stop for Death" and "I heard a fly buzz - when I died"
9. Thomas Hardy: "The Darkling Thrush"
10. A.E. Housman: "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now"

Unit IV: Poetics of War, Peace and the Rebellion (12 Hours)

1. GM Hopkins: "Felix Randal"
2. WB Yeats: "The Second Coming", "Among School Children"
3. Robert Frost: "The Birches"
4. Wallace Stevens: "The Snow Man"
5. Ezra Pound: "The Garden"
6. William Carlos Williams: "Poem"
7. Rupert Brooke: "Soldier"
8. TS Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
9. ee cummings: "anyone lived in a pretty how town"
10. Langston Hughes: "Harlem"
11. WH Auden: "September 1, 1939"
12. Maya Angelou: "Still I Rise"
13. Anne Sexton: "The Truth the Dead Know"
14. Sylvia Plath: "Ariel"

Unit V: Unheard Songs from Distant Horizons (9 Hours)

1. Rabindranath Tagore: "Paper Boats"
2. Kahlil Gibran: "A Tear and a Smile"
3. Kaji Nazrul Islam: "The Rebel" (Trans. Kabir Chowdhury)
4. Pablo Neruda: "Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines"
5. Mohan Koirala: "You Who Remember" (Trans. Michael Hutt)
6. Ko Un: "Runny" (Trans. Brother Anthony)
7. Wole Soyinka: "Telephone Conversation"
8. Bhupi Sherchan: "The Candle Flame" (Trans. Michel Hutt)
9. Michael Ondaatje: "Letters and Other Worlds"
10. Alamgir Hashmi: "The Cesspole"

Evaluation Scheme

Internal Evaluation

External Examination

Prescribed Text

Ferguson, Margaret et al. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed., Norton, 2005.